


When the working day is done

by Mirradin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eldritchfuck Roseworld But Nice, F/M, Fluff, Hair Kink, Hair-pulling, Harems, Kneeling, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pale Porn (Homestuck)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 06:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23967115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Mirradin
Summary: Not long after joining Rose's harem, Sollux hits a downswing. Rose takes care of him.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Rose Lalonde
Comments: 13
Kudos: 32
Collections: AU Eldritchfuck Roseworld: Nice and Voluntary, Id Pro Quo 2020





	When the working day is done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caracalliope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caracalliope/gifts).



Three perigees into your service as part of a human harem, you have established the following: One perigee equals two weeks, two perigees more-or-less equals one month, and this part of the planet is heading into its bright season and isn’t going to come out of it for way too many perigees, weeks, or months.

You curse, and Dave raises an eyebrow above the rim of his shades. “Dude, do you have a grudge against nice weather or something?”

“It’s going to be this bright for _eight perigees_?”

“Brighter, probably!” Jade says. “This spring’s been really cloudy, but it should clear up in a few weeks.”

“And then it’ll be barbecue time!” John cuts in enthusiastically from the head of the table. For a noble he has absolutely zero sense of decorum. Works for you.

“’Barbecue’?” Terezi inquires, leaning over the table. “I am not familiar with this human custom!”

Dave launches into a description of religious ceremonies in which burnt sacrifices are offered to the gods, which is almost certainly bullshit. You listen with half an ear on the 0.001% chance that it isn’t and you are actually going to have to stand around burning up perfectly good oinkbeast meat at some point. Karkat calls him a liar, a lot less hesitantly than he would have a couple of perigees ago. Dave and Jade are pretty cool.

“You okay, hackerbro?” Gamzee asks from your other side.

You groan, letting your head thump forward onto the table. “No,” you say to the polished wood.

The light isn’t the problem, really. Sure, humans are fucking _obsessed_ with windows – there’s a massive one in your respiteblock, at least one in everyone’s respiteblocks, and an entire wall of the eating block is lined with them, which is the kind of thing you can get away with when your local sun is a weak-ass joke with delusions of stardom and you don’t need to equip every pane of glass with thermal-shielding fabric – and therefore the whole hive is a fuckton brighter than you’re used to, even considering that you used to spend all your time with your window coverings drawn to avoid screen glare. It’s not _comfortable,_ but it’s not the problem. You’ll get used to it soon, and in the meantime you have Trollynol.

The problem is that you’ve hit a downswing.

You should have seen it coming. You _really_ should have seen it coming, except that you’ve been busy – preparing for the selection ceremony, and then the _actual_ selection ceremony where you were sure it was the last time you’d see FF except somehow you got picked too, and then moving into your Lord and Lady’s hive and learning what they expect of you. Which isn’t as much as you thought it would be; John is easy-going, Rose is way less strict than you thought she would be, and nobody want you to wait on them hand and foot. But still. You’ve been running on overdrive for seven or eight perigees with only minor blips; sooner or later you were going to crash.

You’ve taken Trollynol. It helped, in that at least you no longer have a headache. What you really want is to curl up in a dark corner and feel sorry for yourself without having to deal with _people_ , but unfortunately for you the eating block is _full_ of people, and all of them are _obnoxiously_ cheerful. It’s almost enough to make you wish you’d been picked out by the kind of nobles who expect you to maintain a dignified silence at all times, except for how that would actually suck.

Gamzee pats your back. “You be at needing a break?”

“ _Fuck_ no.” You push yourself upright again. “Leave off, GZ, I’m fine.”

You aren’t, but you’re not going to let that stop you. You don’t _think_ John or Rose would get cold feet if they knew about your downswings, but you can’t risk it, not yet. You already got stupidly lucky ending up in a harem with _one_ of your dumbass friends, let alone all of them. So. You’re going to power through the rest of today and whatever noisy games John has planned. When everyone’s gone to ‘coon, maybe you’ll slip into AA’s respiteblock for some pile time.

There _are_ proper ways to ask for a day off, in human households. You learned them on the ship, on the way here, along with all the bullshit guidelines about when and how to use them, and you’re not – there’s nothing _wrong_ with you, apart from your shitty mutant pan.

A hand lands on your shoulder and you jump. “Sollux,” Rose says. “Would you come with me, please?”

“Uh, sure.” You shove your chair back and get up, and belatedly remember that that’s not how you’re meant to talk to your patron, you should have said _as my lady wishes_ or something like that, you _practiced_ this shit. Rose doesn’t show any offence at your lack of manners, though, just smiles at the corner of her mouth and beckons you to follow her out of the eating block.

The noise level drops to a muffled babble when the door closes behind you, and some of the tension in your shoulders bleeds off. The corridor is still too bright for comfort, but at least there isn’t an entire wall of windows allowing the sunlight to pour in and assault your oculars.

“You seemed uncomfortable,” Rose says. “Is something the matter?”

“I’m fine,” you grumble. She raises an eyebrow at you. “It’s nothing. I’m just…tired.”

(You wish you were only tired.)

“Ah.” Rose nods. “If you need to rest…”

“I can manage.” By now it’s a point of pride: You _are_ going to stay on your feet. As long as you’re inside you’ll be fine. Probably.

Rose’s mouth quirks up at the corner. “I see. In that case, I would appreciate your company this afternoon. Not in a concupiscent manner, but I have quite a lot of correspondence to catch up on, and I find company keeps it from becoming unbearably tedious.”

Your shoulders relax. “Yeah, I can do that. I mean, as my lady wishes.” You say that last bit as pompously as possible - you have plenty of examples to draw on; back on the ship you all watched a whole bunch of training vids, trying to catch up on the differences between human and Alternian harem manners, and ended up with clunky over-the-top butler lines stuck in your pans – and Rose laughs. Fuck yeah.

Following her into the main hall, the light flooding through the massive windows makes you wince again, and you wonder briefly if you should have taken her up on the offer of a quiet afternoon in a dark corner. It’s not like making a request; accepting a patron’s gracious offer is something you’re _expected_ to do. You shove it down. Maybe if she wanted to pail, yeah – pailing Rose is fun, when you aren’t in a downswing, but you aren’t sure how well you could do in your current state. But just kneeling and talking should be fine.

You’ve never been to Rose’s study before, unless you did when Dave showed you around the first day. It has another set of massive windows, because of course it fucking does, but Rose takes care of that by pulling the curtains most of the way shut, leaving just a narrow strip of sunlight falling across the floor to let you see what you’re doing.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” she says. “This shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

“Sure you don’t want to pail?” you offer. You still aren’t in the mood, but it feels polite to ask. There’s a seating platform against the back wall that looks like someone’s used it that way in the last couple of days, even.

You think she smiles. It’s hard to make out, in the blissful dimness. “Pleasant as that sounds, it’s best not to put one’s monarch off for too long, or life can become quite inconvenient.”

All right. Decorative harem companion. That’s a thing you know how to do, theoretically. Concubine’s place is by the chair. You drop to your knees, and _don’t_ make a sound when your knees hit hardwood.

Rose pauses with her hands full of papers. “I don’t mind if you take the sofa.”

“I can do it,” you say stubbornly. You aren’t sure why you’re so fixated on this, when she clearly isn’t hung up on the formalities, except to prove that you _can_ do this even when your mutant pan throws you a loop.

“Mmm. In that case, you’ll probably be more comfortable with a cushion.”

Yeah, you probably will. The guidelines always said that presumptive harem candidates should practice kneeling for an hour a night, but you had coding to do and people to troll and basically a million more interesting things to do than that bullshit. Now you’re kind of wishing you had – nah, you don’t, some of your viruses were _awesome_ and you never could have done that if you were wasting an hour a night staring at your shitty nutritionblock linoleum. You hope Rose doesn’t mind your sloppy posture.

You head over to the seating platform. A pail has been shoved not quite out of sight behind one arm. You nudge it with your toe, considering, then pick up a red and blue cushion and drop it beside Rose’s chair. Left side is standard for humans, they told you on the ship, and Rose doesn’t tell you to move it, so it looks like that’s how she wants it. You sink to your knees with a sigh. You remember how to kneel, after all that remedial practice on the ship: Hands on your knees, knees a handspan apart, head bowed. Eridan used to say you held your back wrong, but ED is hilariously over the top about harem shit and FF says it’s fine.

Rose moves around for a minute, opening sliding receptacles and shuffling papers around. You close your eyes. You don’t need to anticipate anything or say anything or do anything but kneel here and breathe.

You’d never admit it to anyone who knew you before you entered Rose’s service, but sometimes it’s a relief not to think.

You smell sulphur, and light flares. “Oh, come on. I know you have a lamp.”

“Of course,” Rose replies, doing something that makes the light flicker and then steady. Lighting a flammable wax-coated filament, probably. “But there’s something to be said for the aesthetic.”

You grunt and shift your weight, trying to get comfortable. “You sound like ED.”

“I confess, I have occasionally considered attending a social event in costume.” The chair scrapes across the floor once, twice. Rose’s hand closes around your horn and tugs you closer. “It would certainly liven things up.”

You should probably have a snarky reply to that, but you’re distracted by the easy confidence of her grip on your horn, like she’s done it a hundred times before. Following where she wants is the easiest thing in the world. You let her pull you in to lean against the side of her chair, close enough to feel the warmth of her body. She runs as warm as you do and she’s mistress to a tyrian.

Once you’re settled she releases your horn and runs her finger down the length of it. You can’t feel much beyond pressure through the keratin, but you feel it when she reaches the base and traces it with a fingertip. You shiver.

“Would it get you kicked out of the noble club?” you ask after a moment. Rose’s finger is still light on the base of your horn, drawing gentle circles around it. Little tingles shiver out across your scalp from the point where she’s touching you. It doesn’t touch the tension you can still feel at your temples, but it pulls your attention away from it.

“Not necessarily.” Rose starts drawing lazy figure-eights on your scalp, around the inner horn and then the outer one, and you sway. You hear the tap of metal on glass from the desk. “Officially, one must show full decorum towards one’s peers, of course, but society will tolerate a degree of eccentricity in the inordinately wealthy. I might offend a few of my counterparts to the point of being politely shunned, but it would take more than fancy dress to have me stripped of my title.”

“Every dress you own is fancy,” you tell her sleepily. Rose’s hand has started stroking through your hair, detouring slightly to avoid your horns, and it’s stripping the tension out of you. It reminds you of being papped, AA’s hands drawing firm lines on your face until you’re boneless. Rose makes an amused sound and ruffles your hair, and electricity shivers all the way down your spine. You make an undignified noise and slump against her chair.

Heh. Now you’re going to live in the hope of seeing Rose head off to some Duke’s fancy ball dressed up as a gamblignant. Maybe John too, he’d think it was hilarious. You should tell KN. She could make hats.

It’s weirdly nice, kneeling here in the darkness. Apart from the leg of Rose’s chair digging into your shoulder – you wriggle to get comfortable, and Rose hooks a couple of fingers around your horn like she’s steadying you, which is helpful. Your legs are not entirely cooperative. You end up with your cheek resting on her leg, which you vaguely think you’re not meant to do, but when Rose lets go of your horn it’s to tuck your hair behind your ear and then resume petting you, which is beyond fantastic, so it must be okay.

There’s a lot of happy yelling outside, muffled by the window-concealing drapes. Sounds like you managed to dodge an afternoon of running around the lawnring shouting, and maybe having sex on the grass. You win.

Rose’s writing implement starts to scratch across paper. Her hand is steady in your hair, stroking little arcs, her nails scratching around your hornbeds where you should take better care of them than you do. You blink hazily and see the glow of your eyes reflected dimly in the varnished wood of her writing platform.

“Get some rest, Sollux,” Rose tells you. You hum in agreement and close your eyes again.


End file.
